The archives that plantations left behind can help us to write their history, but as Saidiya Hartman writes, they also dictate “the kinds of stories that can be told about the persons cataloged, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios.”95 So much was recorded and also so little: birth, death, output, and consumption were diligently noted, but the details of so many human lives are lost between the lines.
